Quote of the Day
If it were not for Carcanet, my library would be unbearably impoverished.
Louis de Bernieres
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
Order by 16th December to receive books in time for Christmas.
Please bear in mind that all orders may be subject to postal delays that are beyond our control.
| |
Guinea Woman: New and Selected PoemsLorna Goodison
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, BAME, Caribbean, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (134 pages) (Pub. Oct 2000) 9781857544862 Out of Stock
My mother loved my father
I write this as an absolute in this my thirtieth year the year to discard absolutes he appeared, her fate disguised, as a sunday player in a cricket match, he had ridden from a country one hundred miles south of hers. She tells me he dressed the part, visiting dandy, maroon blazer, cream serge pants, seam like razor and the beret and the two-tone shoes. My father stopped to speak to her sister, till he looked and saw her by the oleander, sure in the kingdom of my blue-eyed grandmother. He never played the cricket match that day. He wooed her with words and he won her. He had nothing but words to woo her, on a visit to distant Kingston he wrote, 'I stood on the corner of King Street and looked, and not one woman in that town was lovely as you.' My mother was a child of the petite bourgeoisie studying to be a teacher, she oiled her hands to hold pens. My father barely knew his father, his mother died young, he was a boy who grew with his granny. My mother's trousseau came by steamer through the snows of Montreal where her sisters Albertha of the cheekbones and the perennial Rose, combed Jewlit backstreets with French- turned names for Doris's wedding things. Such a wedding Harvey River, Hanover, had never seen. Who anywhere had seen a veil fifteen chantilly yards long? and a crepe de chine dress with inlets of silk godettes and a neck-line clasped with jeweled pins? And on her wedding day she wept. For it was a brazen bride in those days who smiled, and her bouquet looked for all the world like a sheaf of wheat against the unknown of her belly, a sheaf of wheat backed by maidenhair fern, representing Harvey River her face washed by something other than river water. My father made on assertive move, he took the imported cherub down from the heights of the cake and dropped it in the soft territory between her breasts... and she cried. from 'For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)'
The poetry of Lorna Goodison, Derek Walcott says, 'is a rooted, organic delight, true in its intonations to the Jamaican language she loves, fresh in its wit and pain and in the high, spiritual gossip of its leaves.'
The poet is endowed with all the resources of her two traditions: the African-Caribbean and the European. Her poems are politically illuminating because of the ways in which she celebrates this dual inheritance. Each subject and theme can choose an appropriate idiom. Rooted though the poems may be in certain elected landscapes, the poet is a free agent and finds her inflections in the interplay between languages and occasions. Goodison is a black Jamaican woman, but none of those sobriquets adequately defines the rare freedoms that her verse earns from speech and from literature. There is an urgency about her subjects and themes – whether landscape, history or personal experience – which is responsible for the music of her verse.
The Road of the Dread
Tamarind Season Jamaica 1980 Garden of the Women Once Fallen Songs for My son My Will Caravanserai The Mulatta as Penelope 'Mine, O Thou Lord of Life...' Keith Jarrett - Rainmaker Invoke Mercy Extraordinary for Angels Fallen Lullaby for Jean Rhys I Am Becoming My Mother Guinea Woman Nanny For My Mother (May I Inherit Half her Strength) Letters to the Egyptian 'I Shall Light a Candle of Understanding...' This Is a Hymn Heartease I Heartease II Heartease III Heartease New England 1987 The Woman Speaks to the Man Who Has Employed Her Son Recommendation for Amber On Becoming a Tiger Mother the Great Stones Got to Move White Birds Missing the Mountains October in the Kingdom of the Poor Birth Stone Coir Elephant Bag-a-Wire Bun Down Cross Roads In City Gardens Grow No Roses as We Know Them Songs of the Fruits and Sweets of Childhood Outside the Gates Annie Pengelly Nayga Bikkle Name Change: Morant Bay Uprising From the Book of Local Miracles, Largely Unrecorded Some Things You Do Not Know about Me In the Mountains of the Moon, Uganda Morning, Morning Angel Mine Bulls Bay, Lucea To Us, All Flowers Are Roses After the Green Fown of My Mother Gone Down My Mother's Sea Chanty The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry Turn Thanks to Grandmother Hannah Love Song for Great-Grandmother Leanna Aunt Rose's Honey Advice Domestic Incense Signals from the Simple Life This Is My Father's Country My Uncle The Sleeping Zemis Africa on the Mind Today The Mango of Poetry To Mr William Wordsworth, Distributor of Stamps... Country, Sligoville Antoinette Cosway Explains The Gypsy in the Russian Tea Room Vincent and the Orient Max Ernst Painting The Jerboa of John Dunkley Hungry Belly Kill Daley To Become Green Again and Young God a Me Sometimes on a Day Such as This A Bed of Mind I Know I Never Lose You Angel of Dreamers A Quartet of Daffodils Coo Coo Bringing the Wild Woman Indoors The Revival Song of the Wild Woman Close to You Know Was it Legba She Met Outside the Coronation Market? I Am Weary of Winters Mother Spending the Gold of Lovers About the Tamarind For Love of Marpessa Dawn Outwaiting the Crazy Wolf Moon
Awards won by Lorna Goodison
Short-listed, 2022 The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
(Mother Muse) Winner, 2019 The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry Winner, 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry
Praise for Lorna Goodison
'The humble and humbling quality of Goodison's poems has been bedded in a sorrow that is also an exuberance, as if neither can survive without the other. When she uses a striking metaphor, it seems just to have occurred to her, driven by deftness of perception rather than the pressure and labor of invention... Goodison's poems display what we should always look for, a new way of looking at the world. And a fresh way of speaking it.'
William Logan, The New Criterion 'Goodison sheds light on how sharing stories helps us make sense of our world while illuminating the under-explored multitudes that shape it.' Robyn Fadden, Montreal Review of Books 'Mother Muse is a multiple goddess: while the collection sounds like, and oft en is, a rhapsodic celebration centred on brave, gifted and nurturing females,Goodison's idea of the muse is more complex than that.' Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review
'Her female characters spring from the page, speaking in perfect pitch'Martina Evans, Irish Times Books of the Year 2021 '...a major voice in Caribbean poetry' Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian Review Roundup 'A passionate, political collection... Goodison speaks out for future generations' The Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 'A Caribbean and international great.' Jeremy Poynting, Managing Editor of Peepal Tree Press, Guardian Best Books of 2017 'The collected works of the recently appointed Jamaican poet laureate is an endlessly moving and rewarding...Four decades of insight and honesty are gathered in some 600 pages of rich, often fabular verse' Financial Times on Collected Poems
You might also be interested in:
There is an Anger That Moves
Kei Miller
New Caribbean Poetry
Edited by Kei Miller
I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems
Mervyn Morris
|
Share this...
Quick Links
Carcanet Poetry
Carcanet Classics
Carcanet Fiction
Carcanet Film
Lives and Letters
PN Review
Video
Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years!
The Carcanet Blog
We've Moved!
read more
Books of the Year
read more
One Little Room: Peter McDonald
read more
Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati
read more
Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn
read more
Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry
read more
|
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd
|